1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an information-processing apparatus, an information-processing method, a program, and a storage medium, and particularly relates to an information-processing apparatus, an information-processing method, a program, and a storage medium that are adapted to provide digital contents of an appropriate quality while protecting the copyright of the digital contents.
2. Description of the Related Art
In recent years, tuners for digital broadcasts (digital tuners) have been widely available, as a preparation for the change of the TV broadcast system, namely, from an analog-TV-broadcast system to a digital-TV-broadcast system. Further, high-quality (high-resolution) images (contents) have been increasingly provided via the digital broadcasts.
However, since the contents provided via the digital broadcasts are generated, as digital data, the contents can be easily copied by using a personal computer (PC). Namely, the contents provided via the digital broadcasts may be illegally copied. Therefore, contents-protection technologies including high-bandwidth digital contents protection (HDCP) or the like have been developed, so as to protect the copyright of high-quality digital contents. The HDCP technology allows encoding pixel data on the output side and decoding the encoded pixel data on the input side, so as to prevent high-quality video data, high-quality speech data, and so forth from being illegally copied in their original state.
Further, where digital contents are transmitted from a tuner to a display device including a monitor, a display, and so forth that do not support HDCP, it is stipulated that the resolution (image quality) of the digital contents should be reduced to a predetermined level (e.g., 525 p) or lower based on the association-of-radio-industries-and-businesses (ARIB) standard or the like, so as to protect the copyright of the digital contents.
For example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-261959 proposes a system wherein a moving image is recorded by a PC including a digital tuner, synthesized on a screen, and transmitted to a display device so that the display device produces the moving image.